Dr. de Leon attained his BS Electronics and Communications Engineering and MS Electrical Engineering at UP Diliman in 2003 and 2005, respectively. He later accomplished his PhD in Electronic and Electrical Engineering at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom in 2014. His research interests include digital signal processing (DSP) for audio and communications, music information retrieval, audio engineering, and adaptive filters and linear arrays.

Dr. de Leon has over 18 years of teaching experience in his alma mater, UP Diliman, under the Electrical and Electronics Engineering Institute where he teaches Signals and Systems, Digital Signal Processing, Digital Audio Signal Processing, among other things.

In 2007, he received a Faculty Research Initiative Award for his research on the Application of Computationally Efficient Direction-of-Arrival Algorithm in a Multipath Environment, and a Teaching and Research Grant on his research ML-based Direction-of-arrival Estimation for Narrowband Signals. He has also been involved in different research and development projects under the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) and UP Diliman. These include being a Project Leader for Development of Prototype Designs of Musical Instruments Using Select Bamboo Species and Processing Technologies (2019-2020), Development of a Philippine Indigenous Instrument Sounds Database (2018-2020), and Capability Building in Multimedia Signal Processing, Wireless Communications Capacity Enhancement and Next Generation Networks (2008) which were all DOST funded projects. He was also assigned as a Study Leader and then Project Leader for UP funded R&D project, Multimedia Signal Processing under computational algorithmics (Emerging Field) for new user interfaces Year 1 and 2, respectively.

Dr. de Leon has also been a visiting researcher at the Chulalongkorn University in Thailand for the Study on the Performance of H.264/AVC in Wireless Environments in 2007. He also served as one of the speakers for the GCOE International Forum on Intelligent Signal Processing at the Hokkaido University and as a Research Fellow at the Kyushu Institute of Technology for the Study on the Frequency Offset and IQ-Imbalance of OFDM Signals, in 2009 in Japan. He is also a member of the IEEE and Signal Processing Society from 2009 to the present.

In his keynote speech, Dr. de Leon will delve into the topic of strengthening the Philippines’ ability to withstand the effects of climate change by utilizing science, technology, and innovation.